I wrote this a couple of weeks ago while waiting for my daughter to finish a dance class.  Eavesdropping… being a real macco.  Oh well, if they didn’t want me to hear it, they should have been whispering.

I am sitting here – right now – listening to a group of parents talk (loudly) about how they deal with their kids and social media.  One actually said they have no monitoring software – they just lie to the kids and tell them that they have something watching them but they don’t. Right.  And you tell people. Loudly.

These people can’t be serious.

9, 10, 11 year olds with phones?  I don’t remember even having unlimited access to a land line at 11. There were certain acceptable hours for talking with friends, and when that was over, it was over.  There was a reason for that.  My parents would tell me, “you could’ve talked to your friends all day at school, now you need to talk to them at home? Get off that phone.” And I got off, or risked having someone jump on the phone and ask me if I was “mad or what” in an accent that only I could understand, but with a universally understood promise of swift and certain harm if I didn’t get in line and get off the phone.

When I was in school, bullying wasn’t as much of a big deal.  It wasn’t fun, and I am probably still traumatized, but it stayed at school.  I was given sweet relief as soon as I left that building, and went home.  They couldn’t get to me until the next day.  In that time, I was able to recover, get a hug and a hot meal, and be ready for battle the next day – refreshed and renewed by my parents, who knew everything that was happening.  Today? Parents don’t have a clue.  One of these “parents” just said their kid had a right to privacy.  Um, they do?  In the bathroom, yes.  In their bedroom, to a point.  On a computer that I pay for or a phone that I provide?  Absolutely not.

Bullies have access to our kids through social media, 24/7. We talk about how much pressure kids are under these days, but we are allowing it.  Should an 11 year old have to deal with someone texting them to tell them they are a whore?  It happens.  Why can’t we let our kids be kids for a while, and let them leave the bullies at school?  They have plenty of time to be stressed out when they are older.

When an adult has to bring work home from the office on a regular basis, it is can be stressful.  Paperwork stinks, especially in the sanctuary that is your home. Nowadays, bringing work home includes dealing with the same awful co-workers and superiors that you have to deal with for 9 hours a day, via phone calls, email, text, and instant message. That’s stress on top of stress.  For people who bring work home, this new level of connection with work and the people there affects their mood – they can’t sleep, they complain more, they get sick often, they feel overwhelmed.

For kids, school is the equivalent of work for adults.  Yes, they bring work home in the form of homework, like adults bring home paperwork, but now they are bringing their classmates and all that drama home too.  We adults don’t deal with it well, but we put that on our kids with no reservation, because Billy’s mom said that Billy could? Billy’s mom is not the boss of me.

Back when I was younger, well before cell phones and sexting, laptops, iPads, and fake Facebook accounts created to ridicule and bully, kids were getting humiliated via the newest innovation in communication – the three way call.  You remember how that used to go?  Call your friend, and then call someone you plan to humiliate (who believes they are your friend) on three-way without telling them that anyone else was on the other line.  Then ask a series of private questions, while your other friend giggles with the phone on mute at the undoubtedly embarrassing answers.  Today, we are a far cry from the do you like so and so, and have you kissed so and so, on three way.

“Well, I have all their passwords – that was the condition for them having accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.”

So. What.

Let me tell you how this works. You have passwords to the accounts they want you to have access to.  Those are the accounts that they use to follow auntie so and so on Twitter, and grandma on Facebook. Then there are those that you don’t know anything about. A gmail account is free and takes a few seconds to create.  Creating a new facebook account using that new gmail address that is unknown to you takes even less time.  Checking a box that says, “yes, I’m 18 and over” takes milliseconds.  Using that new secret gmail account, they create Twitter, Instagram, and other accounts, also unknown to you which they control from their cell phones.  They post benign stuff every now and then on the accounts that you have passwords to (“out having pizza with granny” or “my mom is the most wonderful person in the world” or even better “school is amazing, my mom was right”), so that you think that they are still active, when in fact, the real stuff is going on out of your sight.

These are kids… KIDS people!  Why are we giving the world access to them, and vice versa – good, bad, and ugly?  Why all of a sudden is this okay?  Why is, “because so and so has one,” a viable reason for me, as a parent, to provide anything? As a teenager, I got away with so much with so little.  These kids today have technology on their side!

Has anyone thought about returning to the simpler time when kids had a moment of peace? True, it was sometimes forced, but at least it was there.